Vice President of Shanghai Jiaotong University Visited GEDI and UK-China (Guangdong) CCUS Centre

On November 10th, Zhen Huang, vice president of Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU), visited Guangdong Electric Power Design Institute (GEDI) and UK-China (Guangdong) CCUS Centre (GDCCUSC) and was receipted by Bixiong Luo, General Manager of GEDI, Lan Chen, Deputy General Manager of GEDI and Director of GDCCUSC, Xi Liang, Secretary-general of GDCCUSC, and Hui Yang, Deputy Secretary-general of GDCCUSC. The three parties discussed the cooperation opportunities in renewable energy and CCUS.

Bixiong Luo extended his warm welcome to the SJTU delegation and introduced the development history, overall management and international cooperation of GEDI. He said that GEDI was currently increasing its input of resources in renewables and municipal infrastructure construction, including the planning of smart and integrated energy system.

Prof. Zhen Huang introduced, for energy research, SJTU set up the Energy Research Institute and International Energy Research Center to address technical development and policy and strategy research respectively. SJTU also owns the multi-energy-disciplinary national engineering research centers for offshore wind power and smart grid and research institutes of fuel cell and solar energy. Prof. Huang highlighted that they were recently very concerned about the development of “energy interconnection” which could be used to increase the efficiency of renewable use.

As introduced by Prof. Huang, SJTU received the funding from ADB last year and established the CCUS research center in this April to research on carbon capture and storage, carbon trading and carbon financing.

Prof. Lijun Yu, Deputy Director of the Energy Research Institute of SJTU, briefed on the main research work of the CCUS research center. They included whole chain research of CCUS, membrane separation and chemical absorption CO₂ capture test platform, oxy-combustion, oleaginous microalgae carbon sequestration, organic working medium and CO₂ refrigerating cycle power generation, etc.. They’ve also conducted detailed research on the offshore storage conditions which helped them select a few optimized storage sites.

Xi Liang, Secretary-general of GDCCUSC and energy finance associate professor of The University of Edinburgh, introduced GDCCUSC and reviewed on the capture, offshore storage and CO₂ utilisation work and the future plan of Guangdong CCUS demonstration project implemented by GDCCUSC. He also concluded the other research projects, public engagement activities and other capture projects, which were expected to commissioning at the end of next year, in Guangdong undertaken by GDCCUS. He suggested the SJTU CCUS Research Center and GDCCUSC should strengthen the communications and cooperation on the R&D of capture technologies, the building of laboratories, and marine engineering research on CO₂ storage.

The demonstration project will be based on the coal-fired units of CRP Group Haifeng Plant. In stage I, the Carbon Capture Test Platform is planned to build on Unit 1 of the plant with two sets of carbon capture facilities designed, testing chemical adsorption, membrane separation and physical absorption technologies with two of them will be selected to be applied in the million ton whole process demonstration built on unit 3 and unit 4 of the plant. The feasibility study of the Carbon Capture Test Platform was completed by August 2016 By GDCCUSC, and the construction is expected to start later next year.

SJTU, GEDI and GDCCUSC discussed on the cooperation opportunities for the three parties, and agreed that SJTU and GEDI could work together on energy interconnection, “the Belt and Road Initiative”, wind power and hydrogen energy. While for SJTU and GDCCUSC, the potential cooperation could be focused on policy research, CO₂ resource utilisation and laboratory building as the government’s support and utilization are essential factors in the deployment of CCUS and SJTU owns some laboratories with excellent research abilities.